After taking 2024 off to be financially responsible, Ryan began having foolish thoughts again and somehow convinced me to take a stab at racing the Ford Mustang we had purchased previously. Unlike last time, it would mostly be just Ryan and I prepping this car - thankfully, it was about 80% ready to go. Having learned from our last race where our automatic transmission failed, we felt good knowing that our new Mustang was also an automatic.

Ryan returned from France and had some solitary days to put the finishing touches on the car, but he spent most of them finishing a research paper from over the summer. The primary tasks we had remaining were applying the decals (which Ryan did on the rainiest day of the summer) and replacing the brakes (Ryan performed a thorough glance and assured me the brakes looked great). I planned to fly in from Texas immediately after work, but thanks to some weather delays, didn't make it home until 2 in the morning. In that time, I managed to find everything except for one of the pads on the HANS device, which didn't matter. At 6am, it was time to load the car and head off.

For the race weekend, Ryan and I were joined by Marlon returning as a Driver and Rob Finke driving for the first time. Marlon's girlfriend Cait was also with the team for the weekend, and proved to be extremely helpful to have around the paddock. We nearly passed tech, save for the fact that the fire suppression tank was mounted upside down and the inspectors couldn't see the expiration date (easy fix). Oh, and the missing HANS pad was an issue too. I assured the tech inspector I had misplaced it but it would be on for the race.

Flipping the fire suppression tank was light work, given our tremendous prowess and skill. Unfortunately, flipping the tank revealed an expiration month and year of August 2025. The date was August 1, 2025. Hmmmmm. We looked into getting the tank recertified or replaced, but the closest option was over an hour away and wouldn't open until the next day. So for now, our plan was to retech the next day and cross our fingers. Moving onto the foam cushion on our HANS. We asked around for an extra, but to no avail. Luckily, Ryan borrowed many foam sleeping mats from his dad for the weekend. We sliced out a HANS-cushion-sized piece and got help from another team spray painting it black. Voila!

We passed tech the next morning, fire suppression tank and all. We were ready to go. Marlon, Rob and I would be taking shifts driving this weekend, and the early stages of the race revealed a car that was much quicker than the Honda Accord ever was - while not the fastest on track, not embarrassingly off the pace either. The biggest hiccup we had was rigging an easily removable pedal extender so we could reuse the same seat setting for all three drivers - not a bad worst issue to have at all. When the time came for the first refueling (we used an advertising sign we found in our U-haul to flag down Marlon.), we hauled our fueling equipment to the hot pits only to watch our car get towed in. It had run out of fuel on the track. We scolded Marlon for his inattentiveness and fueled back up in the paddock. While doing so, we noticed a rather interesting smell, and upon further investigation we realized it wasn't terrible barbecue, it was our brake pads. They were completely grinded down to metal on metal. We had brought spares and got to work replacing it when the front right brake caliper disintegrated before our eyes. A replacement was located at a local auto parts store (somehow, they only had a front right for our car. Shoutout Cait), and we worked late into the night to get the brakes ready to go for the next day.

We woke up, flushed the brake system, and were ready to roll for the second and last day of racing. Saturday had been a mixed bag, but we had fully new brake pads (plus one new caliper) to show for it. The first exciting moment of the day was a massive crash from myself. Given my natural talent behind the wheel, it must've been a one-in-a-million stroke of bad luck. The car had shut off upon the hard impact, and I found myself unable to crank the engine and get going again. After being towed in and telling the team that the car was broken and our weekend was over, another team informed us that there was a kill switch in the trunk that triggers upon hard impact. Crisis averted. Oh, and the tow strap failed while I was being towed off the track. Marlon cobbled one together using our expired harness, and we sent the car out yet again.

Just kidding. Rob put in some quality laps before returning to the paddock to discuss a strange noise he had heard in the engine. We assured him that since we had no clue what it could be, it was probably fine, and instructed him to go back out. Unfortunately, the car was out of gas it seemed (again). We pushed it manually down to the pumps (not as easy as it sounds), gassed up the car, and discovered it still didn't work. Discussions with other teams revealed that we likely fried our fuel pump due to running our original fuel tank, which wasn't quite suitable for racing - this had been the reason for our constant running out of fuel and our the fuel gauges unreliability throughout the weekend. Our weekend was over. We had turned 105 laps, coming in 90th out of 93. While we chalked up the result of our first race to being beginners, this time we were sorely disappointed. It's become apparent to us how much we have to learn, and we hope to come back better (again). Looking to the future, we're hoping for a last hurrah before starting our adult lives. But while we headed into this race thinking we had it all figured out, the second run taught us how much we had to learn. Every time we race, we are shocked by the knowledge of the teams around us, but also grateful that the other teams are always so willing to help us (shout out to the McMaster car team in particular). Stay tuned to see our next great success!